From the reports I've seen over the last 5 years, the King himself neither likes nor supports this law, and has publicly spoken out against it, however the government in charge refuses to do anything about it. (Other than using it as a spike club against people they don't like.)

What I've read, unreliable speculation, is that the King publicly denounces the law and privately supports it in order to maintain his popularity. He also, reportedly, wields a great deal more influence than he's actually supposed to.

Thailand's wealth comes from exports. Without exports, it'd be nothing much. It's not about some bad outside world supposedly trying to change the Thailand's system. It's about your customers telling you to put up or shut up, in a roundabout way. Thailand is free to ignore it at its own peril, pretty much. They are participating in global trade, with it come both benefits and obligations. You're deluded if you think otherwise.

Greece, Italy and Spain were also offering everybody a chance in exactly the same way: offering crazy wages and benefits for little productivity. See where that went? Thailand is going there if a joe random hat seller can make $2k in profits. Unless you're just saying that your GF is in a very lucrative spot and sells high-end goods, which doesn't make her representative of what's going on then, does it? Just like a $100k/year NYC panhandler isn't representative of how most jobless have it.

Never mind the fact that no matter what the King has done, everyone should be free to "shit" on him. It's a basic freedom. You don't need to trade it off for the other greatness bestowed by royalty (supposedly, as you claim). One doesn't preclude the other. There are other relatively successful kingdoms out there where such freedoms exist, duh.

I haven't seen a "Made in Thailand" mark in, it has to be, 15 years. I just looked around at everything in my immediate vicinity, and it is almost all "Made in China", except for this pad of sticky notes that is "Made in USA" and my shoes which are "Made in Philippines"

Hard disks - lots of them come from Thailand. Easier to ensure that sensitive technology is kept in-house and not leaked to up-and-coming competitors.

A lot of hard drives are made in China too these days. After the flood, it seems the Chinese factories have been commissioned to build more of the hard drives. And these aren't just taking the drive and stuffing it in an enclosure, these are the actual mechanisms themselves. From low end to top end hich capacity drives as well.

Presumably because people are taught from birth that communism is evil but it's okay to invite monarchist totalitarians to the barbeque? And if they're rich and likely to bring plenty booze, so much the better.

Communism is an unstable state in nature. It was tried lots of places besides Russia at around the same time - including many religious colonies in the US. None lasted. So the meaningful question is not, "what is a Communist nation like" but rather, "what tends to happen when a nation pursues Communism." (And by the way, the same is true of libertarianism - it is unstable. Unregulated freedom for everybody lasts for about 5 minutes before power consolidates.)

Presumably because people are taught from birth that communism is evil but it's okay to invite monarchist totalitarians to the barbeque? And if they're rich and likely to bring plenty booze, so much the better.

One of the fundamental principles of communism is that it must spread and take over the entire world. Marx himself said that. Communism inherently cannot co-exist peacefully with non-communist countries, not if they are sticking to their ideology even moderately. That's why people are taught from birth that communism is evil. Because it is.

The relevant quote from the end of the Communist Manifesto (Chapter 4 if you want to find it yourself):

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

OTOH, most monarchical totalitarians are perfectly willing to let everyone else live in peace so long as their power isn't threatened. Pragmatically speaking, most countries are fine with that so long as they keep their humanitarian fouls to a relative minimum. Other countries only turn their attention towards them when they either a) expand their power by conquering other countries (or threatening to), or b) start murdering lots of people in cold blood. And even those can be ignored if it's politically convenient, since starting war over someone else's problem is... well, frowned upon, at least after the fact, when people notice the bill.

One of the fundamental principles of communism is that it must spread and take over the entire world. Marx himself said that. Communism inherently cannot co-exist peacefully with non-communist countries, not if they are sticking to their ideology even moderately. That's why people are taught from birth that communism is evil. Because it is.

Sounds a lot like some organized religions or at least a few of their denominations...

Cuba has an embargo because they nationalized property owned by US citizens and corporations. I assume there wasn't much US investement in Thailand when it went communist. There was also that whole thing with the nuclear missles. I don't think Thialand has ever been a security risk to Florida and Texas.

You're going to have to learn to live with the fact that political parties and movements take up names, yet often end up taking positions and performing actions contrary to where their name came from, and they will be remembered for those. It also doesn't help if there is a repeating pattern of movements in a particular name going sour in the end. Regardless, brighter people can keep things separate, that there are many factions and flavors of some movements, and the dumb ones that can't keep things separ

Exactly! Actual communism is impossible. What we see every place it's tried is the sort of horror, misery, death and oppression that such attempts always turn into. Because the movement's ideals require that sort of tyranny in order to get things under way, and never progress past that part because... because they don't really want utopian everyone-gets-the-same-stuff-while-only-a-few-people-produce it wonderlands anyway. They just want someone else's stuff, and once they have that, they just want power.

I can easily see this sort of thing happening in the US. Imagine a group of olive-skinned young men sitting in a cafeteria talking, in a purely hypothetical manor, about potential local terrorist targets and how they would go about hypothetically attacking them.

They wouldn't even have to be olive-skinned. They could even be black. Or lily-white. A bunch of guys, sitting around in public discussing how to attack potential targets, would be rounded up and questioned.

On the other hand but you could approach the argument the other way. Does he actually have to utter the name in order to communicate something. i.e. if I said something like, I have a strong distaste for recent versions of Windows, especially Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and *censored* then it would be pretty clear what the item was that I was referring to.

I'm not saying that I agree with this sort of law, but I think the headline is rather sensationalist. From what I gather, from the perspective of the prosecution, it should be more like 'Thailand Jails Dissident for what the dissident communicated (non-verbally)'.

It would be kinda like being charged with conspiracy to commit a felony here for talking with some friends about how you go about robbing a bank; in a purely hypothetical manor.

The sad part about that comment is that this kind of thing does happen in the US. Try walking into any major airport and casually discussing with a friend how could "hypothetically" blow up the airport.

The sad part about that comment is that this kind of thing does happen in the US. Try walking into any major airport and casually discussing with a friend how could "hypothetically" blow up the airport.

It just occurred to me that our country is so sensitive about that, there is a very real possibility one could find themselves in trouble simply for posting about talking about hypothetically blowing up an airport.

The injustice here is that he's being imprisoned for expressing an opinion that involves the King and his role in politics. That's rotten.

I suspect most people here will assume, instead, that the injustice is that he didn't name the King explicitly, but courts tend to make reasonable inferences that people using certain language and gestures intend to communicate a concept even if they don't state it explicitly in ${language}. Just as you couldn't say "One of my co-workers is a pedophile and it's not" ${list of everyone except the person you're refusing to name} without being at serious risk of being sued for libel, likewise it sounds like the dissident made gestures that would only be interpreted in one way by the crowd.

While it is true that a court can make reasonable inferences, as in your example, that is not what the court did at all. They made a huge jump. While the court claimed to be doing such a reasonable inference, the court was in fact lying through it's fascist, censoring teeth. Only a fool believes the word of a fascist censor.

The question is not what a Thailand, fascist, censoring court would do, but instead what a fair court would do.

Generally I agree, but there's one point that we may not see.It may be a common way in Thailand to refer to the king by covering your mouth, and this may be a known way of referring to him while not referring to him. Sorta like saying "the F-word" in the US.I don't know, but if it is,the sentence would make sense

PS: Bush hasn't been President for four years. Either use the current one in your analogy, or choose a doozy, like Millard Fillmore;)

He stopped short of insulting the king. It does not matter that he communicated what he felt about the king, what matters is did he actually insult or defame him.

Yes it was clear he was talking about the king.

Here's where you lose me. If it was expressing obvious that he was talking about the king, whether by gesture or even simply highlighted omission, then let's look at why your next premise is or is not true: that it matters exactly what words he said and if he explicitly mentioned the king. Why? I'll grant you that if you try to objectively define the law, then it probably matters. But who says laws have to be enforced or defined objectively? I mean, I personally think they often should for several reasons,

Most of us are concerned about both injustices. We've become a bit desensitized to people being beheaded for criticizing the king of Siam. Someone being jailed for/not/ criticizing him is a new development which can both bring up dormant disgust at the previous crimes and fresh disgust at the new crimes.

They are damned if they do, damned if they don't. Since they are now a country filled only with criminals, they may as well act like it and make sure all of the government is represented by criminals like themselves.

Of course, I don't have much room to talk... as I live in America, land of the arbitrarily scheduled herbs and weapon restrictions set up to make sure that everyone has bomb making supplies or some other contraband in their homes.

I do not see why the court would be against his self censorship.I can see jailing someone who was forcibly stopped from saying something that was illegal, there are tons of laws in the west where what someone thinks you would of done is applicable (even if you have not yet committed any crimes).But it sounds like Thailand wants its citizens to self censor, so why punish it?

His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej is the ninth incarnation of Lord Rama [wikipedia.org], who himself was the eighth incarnation of Lord Vishnu, the Preserver of the Universe. His Majesty is omniscient and He knows what everyone is thinking. It might look odd to the West with its mechanistic interpretation of the observable universe. But, rest assured, they know what was on his mind and they know what he would have done. The only thing that perplexes the holistic Eastern minded Thai people is, "Why is His Majesty using the mechanistic physical instruments like courts and jail, like the simple minded Westerners, and is not using His omnipotent powers to punish him directly and demonstrate His powers over nature for all to see?"

Look at all the titles and decorations he has. Everything from the Grand Cross to the Order of The Peacock, second class.

Look! even the Collar of the Grand Cross of the Order of a Million Elephants and White Parasol (Kingdom of Laos)

Bhumibol has received numerous royal and state orders appropriate to his status.
He is the Grand Master of all twelve Thai royal orders.
Foreign decorations
Cambodia: Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Cambodia, 1954
Burma: The Most Glorious Order of Truth (Thiri

Actually, the king of Thailand is just as censored as anyone else. He's not allowed to speak to his people, and is always silent and muted in public and on TV. All the lese majeste laws are created and enforced by parliament. The Thai monarchy is very much a symbolic post... the only political thing the royal family appears to do occasionally is send flowers to their favored candidates, or sometimes the news media picks up on a certain color they're wearing and interprets it to mean that they support this group - which has led to some hilarity as everyone else starts wearing whatever color to associate themselves with whatever support.

The king is just some Harvard-educated jazz musician. He's probably pretty groovy, we'd never know. Some people blame the queen for starting some of the political upheavals, but I'm guessing it's mostly due to misogyny.

Nobody in Thailand believes the King is omniscient. Nor do they believe he is the reincarnation of anybody. They are just really uptight about having him disrespected or made into a political football. Which actually isn't as irrational as it sounds, when you consider that it is about the only way you could possibly cause a civil war in this country.

But while laughing at the stupid "easterners", remember that your President and 80% of your countrymen purport to believe that after death they will be brought back to life by a magical carpenter who was nailed to a tree 2000 years ago, that a 900 year old man fit a breeding pair of every single animal species on a boat he built himself, and that the greatest ethical issue of our time is whether or not the government should issue marriage certificates to two blokes. Significantly stupider convictions than the invented ones the parent post finds so amusing.

Also check out what happened (and how many people died) when the dissidents he was addressing tried to burn down Bangkok shortly after this. Then try and tell me they wouldn't have found something to convict him for in the US too.

Disingenuous? Perhaps, but when you take that comment in context -- the fact that he is a figurehead without any actual power, and he has demonstrated a nobles oblige [bbc.co.uk] that, I am guessing, few contemporary monarchs have matched-- then I tend to believe he is speaking honestly.

Oh please, it's also true in western courts that an insult does not have to be explicit. An implied insult, or embarrassing someone in a way everyone understands without spelling the name out is perfectly liable to prosecution unless protected by free speech rights (which may not be the case if it is repeated, connected to a financial loss or just slander).

My daughter used to tease my son when they were little calling him "monkey face". One day a monkey came on children's TV and my son turned round and said "mum, dad, can you tell her off... I know what she's thinking".

By convicting people for insulting the king, isn't the judge implying that the king isn't strong enough to stand up for himself? If someone did that to me, I'd be pretty insulted. Throw the judge in jail!

Right? If no one is allowed to say or even IMPLY anything critical of the king (which the king himself said should be allowed, according to a quote in Wikipedia) then that should apply to the judges as well.

Obscenity: The Supreme Court test for obscenity is as follows: (a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Yeah, you can't joke about a bomb! Well why is it just jokes? What about a riddle? How about a limerick? How about a bomb anecdote? You know, no punchline, just a really cute story. Or suppose you intended to remark, not as a joke, but as an ironic musing. Are they prepared to make that distinction? Why, I think NOT.

Okay, it's not exactly the same as what was in the book 1984,but they still arrested him only for what he was thinking (in actuality, really only what they believe that he thought, but even giving them the benefit of the doubt that they were right, this still amounts to arresting somebody because of what they were thinking).

Putting that aside for a moment, the point that the court really needs to consider here is that he DIDN'T.... period. Even if they are entir

Quit thinking about law when you ought to be thinking about power. In this situation, you have a government so bullshit that it can make a law against insulting someone. In that context, it is ridiculous, whenever they decide to act against someone, to get bogged down in technicalities about whether their chosen victim obeyed or violated the law. What they wrote doesn't matter; the ACTUAL LAW is: "stay on my good side." Their chosen victim violated that law.

Glad to hear you've made the move to using only solid state drives or other non-hard drive storage in everything you buy. I still need a few hard drives until large capacity SSDs are affordable, so I'll have to be giving Thailand some of my business.

It's a case of culture clash. I spent a year there in 1974 while in the USAF, and literally everything there was completely different than here, including the colors of the sky, dirt, and vegetation, but especially the people. In the US, hookers are laughed at, jailed, scorned. In Thailand they are respected. Flipping someone the bird is meaningless there, but point your foot at someone and you're looking at a fistfight (actually, a foot fight; Thai boxing makes extensive use of feet). I once had a gun stuck in my face for refusing a shot of whiskey; it turned out that refusing a gift is a grave insult. Funnier was the guy was cool after I drank the shot.

And they revere the king. His picture is on every coin and bill, so if you're there do NOT step on money! Stepping on money is incredibly dangerous. Of course, being American I consider the idea of royalty itself to be absurd and wonder why my British cousins need them?

But if you're going to refuse to buy from Thailans because of this, you're pretty much stuck with only buying things from your own country, because every foreign country is going to have something normal to them that is atrocious to you (and vice versa). Like kings, or censorship, or guns, or burqas, or drugs, or drug laws, or something you consider corrupt where they think not having it is corrupt.

If you want a world econiomy, you're going to have to put up with other cultures' things you hate -- like guns, or gun laws, or censorship, or pornography, or royalty, or religion...

Actually I disagree - we do need them for two reasons. First the monarch can break up political log jams by either dissolving or proroging parliament as required. This is a very limited power but used at the right time can keep the system flowing smoothly. Second having a monarch avoids the need for yet another clueless politician who only cares about getting reelected and will likely cost the tax payer far more than the monarch they replace.

While a monarchy may be somewhat old fashioned the only reason to get rid of something old which works is to replace it with something better. Frankly I have yet to see evidence that there is a better system out there. Given that power rests almost entirely with the elected parliaments I fail to see any gain in replacing a hereditary monarchy with, what will effectively be, an elected one.

And they revere the king. His picture is on every coin and bill, so if you're there do NOT step on money! Stepping on money is incredibly dangerous. Of course, being American I consider the idea of royalty itself to be absurd and wonder why my British cousins need them?

Clearly you have not been paying attention to the antics in DC. If you're British/Australian/etc. when some idiot decides to bring the entire government to a halt as a negotiating tactic you can close your eyes and pretend Grandma (aka: Her Majesty the Queen) will fix it. She may not (she didn't solve Australia's Constitutional Crisis in 1975), but she could.

Sometimes she even does. Canada's Prorogation Crises was solved largely because she realized that letting the Tories get their way for two months (ie: proroguing Parliament from December 4th to January 26th) would not actually hurt anyone, but agreeing to the Opposition's demands could force a new election a few months after the old. If the Opposition actually had the votes in Parliament to govern the country in early December they'd clearly also have those votes in late January, but it they only had the votes to dump Harper, then Harper would be dumped, nobody would run the country for a few moths while they proved they had no plan (literally nobody -- they hadn't agreed who should be Prime Minister), and then everyone would have to pay for a new election. Which Harper probably would have won because a) in october he'd won, and b) would you vote for those morons?

Granted the person who actually did this crap was the Governor-General, but it was widely reported that Governor-General Jean only did those things after consulting with the Queen; and the Canadians got a whole lot of shit for that. It never seemed to occur to anyone that she's got hundreds of years of experience being Monarch of a Westminster-system Democracy (50 years ad Queen of England, Jamaica, Barbados etc. adds up), which is quite useful when something weird happens.

But if you're going to refuse to buy from Thailans because of this, you're pretty much stuck with only buying things from your own country, because every foreign country is going to have something normal to them that is atrocious to you (and vice versa). Like kings, or censorship, or guns, or burqas, or drugs, or drug laws, or something you consider corrupt where they think not having it is corrupt.

If you want a world econiomy, you're going to have to put up with other cultures' things you hate -- like guns, or gun laws, or censorship, or pornography, or royalty, or religion...

(mcgrew here, can't seem to be able to log in on this PC)

Heck, you're stuck with not buying anything, ever,

I've never met a geek who does not have significant problems with his own government, an obscure plan to fix said problems, and extreme frustration that everyone else is not passionate about replacing first-pass-the-post with proportional representation via the Condorcet method.

Thailand has it's problems. They are definitely way too protective of their King to be a good Democracy. But they don't have a debt ceiling, or a Speaker of the House who thinks he has a mandate to thwart a President who won (by almost 5 million) despite losing the popular vote by more then a million.

He doesn't "allow" it to happen, since he has no role in making or enforcing the laws. In the past, the king has spoken out against political abuse of lese-majesty laws.

One more country I'll never visit. One more country I will avoid when buying things.

I am sure the people persecuting this man will be glad to hear it, since they are part of the opposition to the current government. Your boycott makes as much sense as boycotting the USA because the a court makes a ruling that the Obama administration doesn't like. The government of Thailand is far from monolithic.

Thailand is actually a lovely country to visit - great beaches and diving, friendly people (just don't try to hire them to do work for you unless you understand their work ethic and speak their language), incredible culture, and some awesome things to see and do (visit the "tiger temple" where abandoned or orphaned tiger cubs are raised by humans; it's an incredible experience to go up and pet live tigers). There are also some... other... reasons to visit, ranging from "medical tourism" (dental, in particular, is high quality but orders of magnitude cheaper than in the US) to "sex tourism" (exactly what you think it is).

Their politics, on the other hand, are a complete flaming mess. Stay away from them (fortunately, this is easy; I was there for about five weeks and spent almost all of it out of the cities).

Please don't visit Thailand for sex tourism. It only perpetuates the tragedy of human trafficking, many young people are sold and enslaved for a short, disease-ridden, and trashy life, due to the wealth and privilege of those who think they can use people like objects. It is a haunting horrific thing that needs to stop. We humans should treat one another better.

I think maybe you're uninformed. The king doesn't "allow" such crap to happen. The kind is obviously a figurehead, and a tool. I've never heard that the king accused anyone of badmouthing him. It's all the nincompoops who run the government doing it. If Kingy-Poo objects, those more powerful members of the government who enjoy using the king as their tool will set him straight.

I'd rather be a dirt-poor nobody, right here in America, than to be in Bhum-boy's position.

(Who thinks that Thailand will try to have me extradited for calling their king a Bhum-boy?)

You are correct. It isn't the king that is the problem in this case (I'm not sure of any cases actually where the King was the problem). His people love him dearly, much more so than we in the United States care for our current (or any president).

In fact, the King has used what powers he has to pardon those who have been arrested for bad mouthing him. It seems his majesty is actually a quite reasonable person, and I'm sure there was good intentions on the part of the government when they made the law, however, the law enforcement on the other hand....

Not at all accurate. The King pardons people after they've been in jail (since they generally don't get any bail) for weeks or months, and even after convictions he takes time to pardon them, and then gets to be all generous. The King could if he wanted too, tell people that he doesn't like the law and they should get rid of it. He, and his people are together stamping on others basic ability for the most important forms of free speech- the ability to criticize their government. So fuck him, and fuck the monarchy and fuck their laws. Fuck em.

No, he can't. He has to do his own wheedling and backroom dealing to get the right people to back him, since he essentially has no power. I've seen a couple of these things happen a few years ago, and the day & hour he heard about them, he began speaking out against that law and what was being done 'in his name' but against his will.Even though he has no official political power, he does know people, and the populace love him. That allows him to do things, but only after he's been able to build a sufficient backing so that the ones in control won't just ignore him and sweep it under the rug.Remember, a king he may be, but it's a title that comes with no power.